The World Wide Web (the “web”) has transformed from a passive medium to an active medium where users take part in shaping the content they receive. One popular form of active content on the web is personalized content, wherein a provider employs certain characteristics of a particular user, such as their demographic or previous behaviors, to filter, select, or otherwise modify the content ultimately presented. This transition to active content raises serious concerns about privacy as arbitrary personal/private information may be required to enable personalized content, and a confluence of factors has made it difficult for users to control where this information ends up and how it is utilized.
One area of privacy concern is social media and increasingly related social media applications and web sites. Social media generally involves a large number of users who interact socially with one another via the Internet, and allows users to freely express and share opinions with other users via social networking applications. Social networking sites and mobile communication applications collect demographic information such as, for example, address, age and income; identifiers such as name, credit card number, social security number, email address, and photographs via a facial recognition software. In addition to these discrete data points, many applications collect information regarding user behavior, user support (or “like”), and user communication details. Such information is bought, sold, traded, aggregated, and analyzed for marketing and other purposes and also frequently leaked to unintended people and organizations.
As organizations, businesses, and companies expand services offerings through services, common issues of privacy are also gaining prominence. For example, many applications create a data analysis platform that can work with client's customer data and utilize social media type connections and reputation computations to facilitate business-to-business operations. The majority of prior art approaches for controlling user data privacy are complicated and confusing, and may even change with little or no warning. Such approaches do not monitor each site with respect to changes in their privacy policies and settings and do not make adjustments to each site and each setting on a case-by-case basis. Additionally, manual methods of maintaining privacy are time consuming and error prone. Unintended leakage of personal data to potentially unfriendly applications and users is therefore extremely difficult to prevent.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an improved system and method for managing user privacy across multiple online sites and applications and sharing data smoothly while maintaining security, as will be described in greater detail herein.